Following Thursday's telecon, I've done an initial cut of a proposal for
rearranging PROV-DM material:
http://www.w3.org/2011/prov/wiki/ProvDM_Proposal_for_restructuring
I've added abstract to the document outline that try to capture the
distinction/rationale for the proposed structure.
For the most part, I find the distinction between essential structure and
epistemic refinement has bene fairly easy to call, but there are, inevitably, a
couple of areas where it's not so clear for me.
(a) wasInformedBy and wasStartedByActivity - I think these are both instances of
an (as yet) unstated parent structure, which one might call "wasInfluencedBy" -
i.e. any effect of one activity on another activity. My choice would be to have
this new property in the core, and wasInformedBy and wasStartedByActivity as
refinements (i.e.extensions)
(b) wasInvalidatedBy - in terms of capturing the essence of a provenance trace,
this seems of secondary importance, but it does seem to be the natural
counterpart for wasGeneratedBy so I've left it in core for now.
(c) entity specializationOf and alternateOf. These could be argued to be purely
structural, but I felt that they aren't essential to representing a provenance
trace, and they are sufficiently tricky that I didn't want to risk the potential
distraction of including them in the core.
In drawing up this proposal, I have tried to focus on reorganizing existing
material. Separately from that, I think there are a number of possible
improvements, some of which wouldbe facilitated by the reorganization.
I've also included in the core some of the auxilliary material that I think is
needed to properly explain the core data model constructs (attributes, values,
etc.) and have included it further to the front than in the current document,
under "Preliminaries".
#g